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On Premature Optimization

I have heard the phrase “premature optimization is the root of all evil” many times but have never had a chance to consciously put it to the test before. Meta# has a few critical execution paths where performance is a very big concern and has a large impact on how performant the overall process of parsing goes.

I intentionally ignored all performance concerns up till this point however, choosing to trust in the wisdom that says to avoid premature optimization. I finally got to a point where most of the main features I wanted were in place and I have some very good test coverage (turns out I had 91% test coverage the first time I ran the code coverage tool). So I decided to embark upon a journey of performance optimization.

I’d say that it was a huge success! The three new tests are actually parsing all of the .g files in meta# again and tracking their performance. Which means that the slowest tests are now run twice and the whole run is taking about half time time it was before.

I can tell you when I first went to look into where to do optimizations I almost panicked. I thought my code was perfect and that the performance flaw was in the design itself, I had a moment of crisis. But there were tons of low hanging fruit ready for optimization.

So I’m officially a believer in avoiding premature optimization at this point. I would include that I relied heavily on an excellent unit test base to prove that my changes still worked and that is a crucial piece to being able to make these types of systemic changes.

Also, I used the excellentTestDriven.NET performance tools to do give me my data. I highly recommend it. You just right click a test and select Run Test -> Performance. It gives you a very detailed report and the ability to find out your slowest calls very quickly. Optimize and try again! A very clean cycle.